“A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage — the writer's belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come.” WritingCommunityBooksLibrariesWriting BooksShared History Book:The Library Book Source: The Library Book
“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten but that we are all doomed to being forgotten; that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts nothing matters. Everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.” LifeWritingBooksMemorySavingRecognitionConnectionForgettingObscurityRemembering Author:Susan Orlean
“Writing about fashion forces you to overcome the nagging feeling that fashion doesn't "matter", that it's trivial or fleeting. I just look at it anthropologically, which is different from the way I'd write about art.” WayWritingLooksArtDifferentMatterFeelingsForceFashionOvercomingFleetingNagging Author:Susan Orlean
“Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it's worth knowing about them. That's challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.” PeopleWritingMeanChallengesKnowingPiecesReaderPureDiscoveryArguing Author:Susan Orlean
“Writing about someone well known removes that obligation of defending it as a subject, but it also means that some of the surprise and freshness is already gone. It's so different - in some ways much harder for me.” WayWritingWellsMeanDifferentKnownGoneSubjectsHarderSurpriseObligationRemoveWell KnownFreshnessAlready Gone Author:Susan Orlean
“Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.” WritingLongDifferentDoneFormInterestAttentionBites Author:Susan Orlean
“Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.” WritingYearsBookSchoolLawThreeFatherTwentiesUrgesLaw School Author:Susan Orlean
“I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing.” WritingPiecesTraditionalMagazinesBreadth Author:Susan Orlean
“I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.” WritingPleasureFictionClassTeachNew YorkUniversityNon FictionFiction WritingSyllabus Author:Susan Orlean
“I once had a boyfriend who couldn't write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-up reenacter or something.” WritingLongLong TimeDressesShirtsLong Time AgoReally WeirdNeckties Author:Susan Orlean
“I'm always mystified by the day-to-day workings of entities like Twitter that provide framework but not content, but I suppose it could be compared to the U.S. Postal Service, which manages to keep a lot of people employed doing lots of stuff other than writing letters.” PeopleWritingStuffLettersManageEntityDay To DayEmployedFrameworkPostal Service Author:Susan Orlean
“Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.” WritingChildrenSeemsParentLinesNotionProfessionSecurePersistenceSuggestingOlympian Author:Susan Orlean
“You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.” WritingSimply Love Author:Susan Orlean
“Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.” WritingPages Author:Susan Orlean
“When you're researching you're learning. When you're writing, you're teaching.” WritingTeaching Author:Susan Orlean
“There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.” WantWritingSoundSentencesMasteryMarvelousTweak Author:Susan Orlean
“There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.” WayWantFeelsWritingTryingDoeSometimesCertainSongReadingSoundMagicSentencesTinyFlyingHolesRhythmLoudMasteryMarvelousShiftingDiggingTweak Author:Susan Orlean
“I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.” IfsWritingEnoughStoriesParticularJustificationIf You Care Author:Susan Orlean
“Like writing, running is so much about mind over matter. There are times when you have to override the discomfort and keep pushing. That capacity to endure and then prevail is just amazing.” WritingMindMatterRunningCapacityEndurePushingDiscomfort Author:Susan Orlean
“You have to appreciate the spiritual component of having an opportunity to do something as wondrous as writing. You should be practical and smart and you should have a good agent and you should work really, really hard. But you should also be filled with awe and gratitude about this amazing way to be in the world.” WorldWayShouldWritingHardSpiritualOpportunityGratitudeSmartAppreciateShould HaveFilledPracticalsAgentsAweComponentsWondrous Author:Susan Orlean
